The Marrowbone Marble Company

by Glenn Taylor

  Wimpy looked at his brother, then poked at the cookstove with a skinny log. Sparks kicked around inside like lightning bugs dying.

  Ledford watched the hot square and let his eyes blur before Wimpy closed it back up. He thought about his furnace-tending days, how it was to be in charge of all that heat.

  Wimpy brushed his callused hands against each other. He leaned his elbows on his knees and cocked his head to Ledford. “We’re kin to Ledfords,” he said.

  It caught all of them off guard, as Wimpy had not said a word up to then.

  “Yessir,” Ledford answered. “I was reading through some of my daddy’s things, and I came across your family name.” His voice was weak. He cleared his throat.

  Wimpy said, “Was your daddy Bill?”

  “Yessir.”

  The brothers looked at one another. Each was relaxed almost to sleep, one pitched forward, the other tilted back. Dimple had his hands clasped behind his head.

  He said, “Bill’s mother, your grandmother…” He stopped and thought. “Did you know your grandmother?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  Wimpy laughed and Dimple scoffed. He said, “Boy, you still growin, ain’t you?”

  “Still growin hair on his pecker,” Wimpy said.

  The brothers laughed hard then, and Bob and Ledford joined them. When it quieted, Dimple spoke. “If I know right, your daddy’s mother was Rose Coldsnow Bonecutter, my daddy’s cousin.”

  “That’s right,” Wimpy said. He nodded and looked at his shoes, which he tapped softly on the floorboards. The light from the single window wasn’t much. From inside, you’d hardly know if it was night or day. Firelight danced on the black bottoms of nail-hung cast-iron frying pans.

  “Rose taught me in the second grade,” Dimple said.

  Wimpy had a peculiar look in his eyes. “I can see her now,” he said.

  “I was back in the woods a playin and I looked down and it was her funeral, and it cast a pall on ever thing. When you see something like that, it casts a pall, don’t it?”

  “She died of the cancer,” Dimple said. “Her husband was Alfred Ledford.”

  “Your granddaddy,” Wimpy said.

  “Al, they called him.” Dimple watched Ledford close. “You never knowed him.”

  Wimpy said, “Al was from Mingo County, and he was visiting one day with Bill Butcher out here at Fort Gay.”

  “Fine man, Bill Butcher, friend of my daddy’s,” Dimple said.

  “And Al had your daddy with him, must have been four or five years old.” Wimpy held his hand out over the floor to signify height. “And Al started to lay a hard whupin’ on that boy and Bill Butcher stepped in front of him. They got into it and Al Ledford shot him.” He shook his head and poked the fire. “Them Mingo Ledfords were rough people.”

  “Kilt him,” Dimple said.

  Wimpy cupped his ear. “He what?”

  “Kilt him.”

  “Yeah, kilt him.”

  Dimple’s eyes chased an ember that jumped through a crack in the cookstove. “Al Ledford went to the penitentiary over that.”

  “Died there a year later,” Wimpy said. “After that, your daddy lived out here for a time.”

  Ledford’s daddy had never spoken a word on such things.

  Bob coughed and fidgeted. “We been wonderin when you might come out here to us,” Dimple said. He unclasped his hands and set the front legs of his chair to the floor.

  Ledford didn’t know what to make of the last words spoken. He didn’t know what to make of anything. These men, it seemed, were his people.

  Wimpy was nodding his head in agreement with his brother. “I knowed you would come,” he said.

  Ledford wanted to ask if there had ever been a lake on their property. If they remembered him and his daddy fishing from a rowboat, like in his dream.

  The words got stuck in his throat.

  After a long quiet, Dimple asked Ledford if he knew that the Bonecutters were part Indian. Before he could answer, Dimple said, “Shawnee. Trace our blood straight back to Tecumseh. You know who Tecumseh is?” When Ledford said he did, Dimple stuck the kindling back in his teeth and chewed. Then he said, “Maynards think Indians wasn’t nothin but animals. Most folks wouldn’t argue em, I reckon.” He stared at the fire. Finished off his coffee and spat to the floor the remnants of his kindling splinter.

  Outside, the Bonecutter brothers pointed to the land around them, the rising inclines on either side. The hollow, snaking north, fairly wide and cut by a stream, its endpoint the big camelback ridge. Each twin used one hand as a brow visor, the other a sweeping survey tool. For every divot and clearing, they had a name. “This here,” Dimple said, swinging his hand at the earth below their feet, “all this here we call Marrowbone Cut.” Their grandmother had once told them why. She said that the soil was rich like marrow, and that the Lord had dug deep here, just for them to settle on.

  Their mother said different. Everybody thought she was crazy. “This here Cut in the hills,” she used to tell them, “it ain’t from no God, and it ain’t for you. It’s for polecats and slugs, and it’ll swallow ever one of us that stays.”

  Ledford pushed his boot soles against the ground. The words repeated in his head—Marrowbone Cut. He took a long look at the ridge. What had happened to him upon first seeing it was over. Hills looked the same the world over. Ridges rose and fell, east and west. People gave them names. One was not the other.

  He studied the ridge, its empty trees packed tight and reaching skyward. He almost asked Bob if they could stay and climb to its pinnacle. It called to him. But they both had wives and children in town. And it would be unwise to climb the ridge. The Maynards were on the other side, mourning the one who’d come up missing.

  A DREAM VISITED Ledford that night, and in it, the Bonecutter brothers walked the chalk lines of a baseball infield, and an airplane flew overhead. When it passed, the brothers turned for the visitors’ dugout and sat down on the bench. They said something he couldn’t make out. He read their lips. “You couldn’t even afford an ankle,” they said, and pointed to the outfield. Ledford turned and looked to where they pointed. A man with a camera took pictures of another man, who had been crucified. He was skin and bones and wore an unkempt beard. His wrists and ankles were bound with twine to the skinny crucifix. It was made from braided vine, and it leaned against an outfield fence fashioned from chickenwire. All at once, the fence buckled under, and the man on the crucifix went down with it. Ledford looked away. A terrible feeling came over him. The dugout went dark inside. There were sinister movements from its floor. Ledford knew he was dreaming then, but he could not pull himself awake. He could not sit up in bed. His father’s voice spoke clearly: “Raise your hand to your chest, boy. Put your hand on your heart.” Ledford could not open his eyes. He could not raise his hands from the bed. It occurred to him that he was paralyzed, that even his breathing had stopped. There was panic in his blood vessels, silent and without motion. There was the sensation of being eight feet underground, shoulder to shoulder with things he could not turn to see. He could hear them sighing. Then, another voice came. It told him Make marbles, and then his hand came to his chest and he breathed in deep and sat up straight and waited for his heart to blow open from the pressure.

  The voice that had spoken the two words was one he’d not heard in five years, but it was unmistakable. It was the voice of McDonough. It was Sinus from Chalmette.

  Ledford went to the nursery and watched his children. They slept in white-railed cribs against opposite walls, Mary on her stomach and Willy on his back. Arms sprawled wide and mouths open. He placed his hand on their chest and back to feel them breathe.

  It seemed to Ledford then that something had changed. That he could no longer go on as he had been to now. He would live for his children. He would make something real for them.

  In the basement, he opened the big trunk’s lid. He knew tha
t under the swastika quilt, there was nothing but the past, an empty impression of a bottle of Ten High. He closed the trunk and turned to the little desk he’d built against the wall. He sat down at the desk, pulled from its drawer a pencil and a blank-paged, leather-bound journal. He’d bought it a week prior, upon noticing its likeness to his father’s.

  Ledford stared at the empty page before him. His fingers trembled a little. They steadied when he pressed lead to paper. He wrote one word. Marbles.

  FEBRUARY 1948

  THEY SAT TOGETHER ON the west steps of Old Main, the cold concrete numbing their tailbones. The campus sidewalks were salted. “See her?” Don Staples said, pointing with his emptied pipe. Across the green, a woman walked fast and determined. “She’s the new director of physical education for women. Can’t recall her name.”

  Ledford squinted for a better look. “Pretty,” he said.

  Staples nodded. “I believe I’d let her direct my physical education any old day of the week.”

  “I believe you would.”

  “She could measure my growth.” They laughed. Staples said, “I’m not as old as you think I am.”

  Marshall’s campus was shaping up. Folks talked about it going from college to university status.

  Staples pointed his pipe at another walking the cross-cut path. “See him? That little son of a bitch is the one that stirred the pot on me fall semester. Said I offended his morals.”

  “How?”

  “I can’t remember.” Both men looked at their shoes. Staples continued, “He didn’t like something I said about marching tanks through downtown to commemorate Armistice Day.”

  “What did you say?” The young man in question was coming their way.

  “I can’t remember.” Staples watched the young man approach, his spotted bow tie sharpening with each step, his scarf tucked just so into his lapel. “I may have said something that to his ears was unpatriotic. He may have thought me a Communist.” He straightened his back and stuck his pipe in his pocket. “Hello there young fella,” he said.

  The young man stopped at the foot of the stairs. He’d wanted to move past them without altercation. “Hello Professor Staples.”

  “I can’t recall your name.”

  “A. P. Cavendish.” With a leather-gloved hand, he pulled out his pocketwatch and checked it.

  “Cavendish,” Staples repeated. “How could I forget a name like that? Your old French ancestor discovered hydrogen, didn’t he?”

  “I’m not aware of any such thing,” Cavendish said. Another boy hollered from across the green and Cavendish smiled momentarily, waved, then went straight-faced again. His complexion was splotched.

  “Well, sure you’re aware,” Staples said. “You’re full of more hydrogen than most, aren’t you Cavendish?”

  “Professor Staples, I’ve got to—”

  “You blow hot air from both holes, don’t you son?”

  Cavendish had crested a step to keep moving, but stopped dead at this comment.

  “Let me introduce you to my comrade here, Loyal Ledford,” Staples said.

  The two shook hands and nodded. “Cavendish is both managing editor of the Parthenon and president of the Inter-Fraternity Council.”

  “Is that right?” Ledford said.

  Cavendish nodded affirmative.

  Staples said, “Wrote an article, if memory serves, advising President Truman not to integrate the military.”

  “It would be disastrous, in terms of security,” Cavendish said.

  “Is that right?” Ledford said. A bell sounded inside the building behind them.

  “Ledford here is a glass man,” Staples continued. “A fire-eater. Raised by Indians. You know all about fire-eating, I’d imagine?”

  Cavendish did not respond. “What with your hydrogen ancestry, and hot air rising and all. You ever put flame to your flatulence, Cavendish?”

  There was an awkward silence, as Cavendish looked from one man to the other, both seated yet towering, both boring holes with their hooded eyes. The wind picked up. “I’ve got to get to class,” Cavendish said.

  “By all means.” Staples pointed his open arms up the stairwell, designating a clear path. “Walk the path of enlightenment young man.”

  They watched the doors close behind him, then looked at one another and shared a laugh.

  Neither spoke for some time. “Dreams after you lately?” Staples stared out beyond the college gate at Sixteenth Street. A car sounded its horn.

  “Some.” Ledford lit another cigarette.

  “Any more with McDonough?”

  “No.”

  “Your daddy?”

  “No.” Ledford squirmed at the thought of how much he’d shared with the man. It both frightened and freed him. He watched the traffic turn on Third Avenue, gray exhaust dancing on the frozen air. He said, “But the other night, I woke up and Rachel wasn’t in bed with me. I walked to the nursery and the cribs were there, but the rails were all broken and splintered and they were empty inside. I went back to bed, laid down, shut my eyes, opened em again, and there was Rachel. And I went back to the nursery, and sure enough there was Willy and Mary, cribs just fine.” He cleared his throat.

  “Well, you weren’t awake the first time. You were dreamin.”

  “Sure didn’t seem like it.”

  Staples nodded. He knew the feeling. “Your job?”

  “I’m liable to kick a hole in the office wall. It’s all scheduling and getting on the phone with men who think the dollar is salvation. And now, the old man up in Toledo has died, so his sons are taking ownership, and word is they play golf with Charlie Ball.” Along the bricks, a lone squirrel scurried. It cut across the grass and climbed the trunk of an oak tree, spiraling its length as it went. Ledford wondered why it wasn’t in its nest. He went on, “I’d rather be back at the furnace.”

  “Maybe you ought to be back in school. Get your doctorate. Teach.” Ledford laughed and thumbed up the stairs behind them. “I’ll join ole Cavendish in the fraternity house. Get on as delivery boy for the paper.” He wiped his nose with a coatsleeve. “No. I’m done with school, just like I’m done with the Marine Corps.”

  Staples thought hard about what to advise. The younger man at times seemed a contemporary of himself. “Whatever you do, don’t ever fancy the idea of politics like my brother.” The race for governor was on, and Bob Staples was a longshot.

  “Is it not going well?”

  “He thinks of me as his advisor on matters of faith, and right now I’d advise him to remain who he is. He’s tampin out his fire, got his compass set to some direction I can’t figure.” The wind picked up. Staples pulled his lapels. “It isn’t righteous or noble, that’s for certain.” He tapped his shoe soles against the stone and shook his head.

  “I was afraid something like that might happen,” Ledford said.

  “Yes, yes. My brother.” Staples changed gears. “Well, I have thought a little on it, and maybe you ought to do this marble company idea.”

  “That’s what I’m thinkin.”

  Staples patted Ledford on the back. “I wish I could tell you how to go about all of it,” he said to him. By it he meant life. “I know it’s got something to do with holding on to the ones you’ve got, and if you can, on top of that, make a little music and have a little fellowship. Build something.” He thought for a moment on the word build. “But not like they do nowadays,” he said. “I mean build, like they did before all this.” He took his arm away and waved it toward Sixteenth Street, Third Avenue, the mill, the boxcar foundry. “You got to do what you know is right,” Staples said. They looked at each other then. “And I mean right by your family, not by you alone. And your family, in the end, is everybody.” He often spoke this way. He called it soapboxing. “Or, you can do right only by yourself, like most do these days. And Mack Wells’ child will grow up to hate your child and both of them together will grow up to hate the little Russian children, and a few silver-spooners like Cavendish there, and a
whole lot of regular boys will run off shortly to Korea, and you know what happens then.”

  Ledford nodded. He knew.

  MAY 1948

  THE RETURNS WERE IN The Daily Mail’s Evening Edition ran photographs of the primary winners, stone-faced and staring at something beyond the camera lens. “Why don’t any of these men smile?” Rachel asked. She bit into an apple. Baby Willy was at her breast, half asleep. He was big at eight months, and most young mothers would have long since weaned their babes from the breast, if they’d ever breast-fed at all. But not Rachel. To her, such separation seemed wrong. “Bob Staples would have smiled,” she said. Her feet were crossed on the opposite kitchen chair. Mary sat beneath her mother’s legs, a kitchen tent of sorts, under which she whispered secrets to her one-legged Raggedy Annie.

  “Bob Staples didn’t even come close,” Ledford said. He was leaning against the counter’s edge, swirling the beer in his can. His tie was undone. Just home from work. “He played the big boy’s game and lost.”

  Mary laughed at something she’d whispered to Raggedy Annie. A strand of her hair tickled the back of Rachel’s knee. “Well, no one was going to beat Okey Patteson,” Rachel said, “and Bob’s a good man, Loyal.”

  “If you say so.”

  “He is and you know it.”

  “I did know it. Not no more.”

  “Not anymore,” Rachel said. She’d eaten her apple to the core, spitting out the seeds as she went. She pushed the little seeds around on the tabletop.

  “Uh-huh,” Ledford said. He finished his beer and threw it in the trash. “Anymore, no more, same thing. That man talked a big game, but when it came down to it, he balked.” Ledford got to his knees on the linoleum. “Hello,” he whispered to Mary, then the same to Raggedy Annie. They ignored him. He winked anyway, kissed his daughter’s cheek, and stood back up. As he did, his vision went black and he nearly fell over.